Use automatic captioning

Captions are a great way to make content accessible for viewers. YouTube can use speech recognition technology to automatically create captions for your videos. These automatic captions are generated by machine learning algorithms, so the quality of the captions may vary.

Automatic captions on videos-on-demand

If automatic captions are available, they'll automatically be published on the video. Automatic captions may not be ready at the time that you upload a video. Processing time depends on the complexity of the video's audio.

YouTube is constantly improving its speech recognition technology. However, automatic captions might misrepresent the spoken content due to mispronunciations, accents, dialects, or background noise. You should always review automatic captions and edit any parts that haven't been properly transcribed.

Here's how you can review automatic captions and make changes, if needed:

Troubleshoot automatic captions issues

If your video doesn't generate automatic captions, it could be due to one or more of the following reasons:

The captions aren't available yet due to processing complex audio in the video.

The language in the video is not yet supported by automatic captions.

The video is too long.

The video has poor sound quality or contains speech that YouTube doesn't recognize.

There is a long period of silence at the beginning of the video.

There are multiple speakers whose speech overlaps.

Automatic captions on livestream videos

Automatic captions for livestreams are available in English only.

Automatic captions for livestreams are currently being rolled out to English channels with over 10,000 subscribers, streaming at "normal latency," when professional captions are not available. We encourage creators to provide professional captions first; to learn how, follow the steps here.

After the live stream ends, live automatic captions will not remain and automatic captions will be generated based on the VOD process.